I have a solution in mind: moving all examples that are purely fan perception to Counterpart Comparison, but someone did bring up that we need something to gauge whether an example is fan perception or intentional by the creator.

I don't know if this is still being worked on, but I'm definitely seeing WAY too many misuses of Expy where a character of an older series is said to be an expy of a character from a much more recent series, and it's grating at me. Should we just go by your proposal and move anything that seems like a fan's Counterpart Comparison to the page, and possibly sort out any that appeal to the other tropes listed in the midst?

The D stands for Destiny ✰ Rosa Metalglove Dickpuncher (also I just got it from Vampire Hunter D).

Counterpart Comparison is quite a bit more than just "Fans seeing an expy where one might not exist." It's basically about an expy being treated the same as the character they were based on, even when they have a different backstory and whatnot.

We already broadened the definition a while back. The original definition was "creator uses a character who is very similar and based off his previous work". It's long been altered to "someone uses a character who is very similar and based on a previous work whether it's theirs or not".

That in itself is not a problem. The problem is people using expy for every little similarity. "White-Haired Pretty Boy and black-haired samurai duo? Definitely a D.Gray-Man expy! Even though they have nothing else in common!"

The line between Expy's current (mis)use and Counterpart Comparison's definition has become really blurry, though. The simple thing (in my opinion, lazy thing) we can do is merge Counterpart Comparison into Expy to reflect its misuse. If everyone would be willing to take action, though, we could hash out a distinction between the two.

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